Verne Acquisition: Ardian to Grow Sustainable Data Centres
Offering financial support up to US$1.2bn, Ardian will help Verne with its commitments and fund a sustainable expansion plan across Europe.
Verne is a green data centre platform that aims to confront a large and fast-growing data centre market across the continent. Founded in 2012, the organisation is headquartered in the UK and wishes to diversify further across Northern Europe in particular.
Ardian has completed its acquisition from Digital 9 Infrastructure plc (D9), an investment company listed on the London Stock Exchange. With more data centre companies seeking to make operations more sustainable, Verne is well-positioned to take advantage of renewable energy.
Supporting new technologies
With data centres utilising increased levels of power and energy, during an age of rapid digital transformation, companies are looking for new and improved ways to be innovative to ensure a more sustainable future.
With this in mind, Ardian is working to secure a newly green financing package. Verne’s management hopes to benefit from Ardian’s expertise across Europe, in addition to its industrial approach and experience across the digital infrastructure value chain.
“We have ambitious plans to continue growing the company and delivering sustainable data centre solutions,” says Dominic Ward, CEO at Verne. “We want to enable organisations to cost-effectively scale their digital infrastructure while reducing their environmental impact. We are hugely excited to be working with Ardian to help power our future.”
Verne prides itself on having consistently delivered access to cost-effective renewable energy and international connectivity spanning Europe and North America for its international clients. As a result, organisations have often selected the company if they are running high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, including AI, machine learning and large language models (LLMs).
However, sustainability has always been a key focus for Verne too, wishing to help customers scale their innovations in a cost-effective way whilst also reducing their carbon footprint.
Currently, Verne operates with 100% renewable energy in Iceland and 100% decarbonised energy in Finland and the UK.
Creating real sustainable value
With this in mind, Ardian will now support Verne’s value plans by helping it create a growth plan. Supported by Verne management, Ardian plans to multiply Verne’s existing sold capacity of 29MW for 2023 by close to four times.
Additionally, the investment company will help Verne benefit from construction and operating synergies across Europe, leading to strong opportunities. This aims to include existing sites and new locations, with a particular focus on Iceland, Finland, Sweden and Norway, in addition to potential opportunities more broadly in Northern Europe.
Verne will also work with Ardian’s Data Science team to apply new AI use cases in managing its data centres.
“Ardian will support Verne’s top tier management team to match the incredible and fascinating customer AI-driven demand,” comments Gonzague Boutry, Managing Director of Digital Infrastructure at Ardian. “With this investment, Ardian Infrastructure is now exposed to the whole digital infrastructure value chain capitalising on global digitalisation trends.”
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